Blog — Page 75

Blog Power Tools – What We Use and Recommend

Learn Copywriting Before it’s Too Late

What you say matters, but HOW you say it matters most. You can have the best story in the history of the world, but nobody will listen if you don’t first get their attention.

People will take one look at the headlines of your post and decided right there if they’ll give your post a chance. So that headline had better be awesome!

Of course, you can sort of cheat and take a shortcut. A while back we got this great list of proven Headline Templates that you can just copy and easily adjust for your specific articles and blog posts. It’s been an excellent reusable resource. Download this Headline Template list and see what it does for your readership.

Blog Platform

WordPress, no contest. We’ve used TypePad and Blogger, but WordPress wins hands-down for it’s power and flexibility.

Website and Blog Hosting

First and foremost, you need a solid blog hosting provider. We use HostGator and have gotten over 30,000 hits to our WordPress blog in a single day. Not bad for a $9/mo hosting account.

Check out our Review of HostGator and see why we recommend HostGator to our friends.

Stay Top of Mind with Email Marketing

People don’t always have time to visit your website. So give them the option to subscribe to get your content. One option is RSS, but most non-techie people often prefer to subscribe by email. So make it easy for them!

Some people install newsletter software on their PCs to do this, but that doesn’t really work anymore. SPAM complaints have made most email providers automatically discard email that is coming direct from home PCs (yes, than can tell). The only way to get your emails delivered these days is to sign up with a service from a company that maintains a good relationship with the major hosting services – someone in that business who is well respected. They don’t allow spammers to user their systems, so the major email providers (like HotMail, MSN, Yahoo) allow their email to go through.

Aweber is a great option that we have successfully used for this, and which we recommend to our friends regularly – because it JUST WORKS.You just sign up, choose from their fancy HTML email templates, and start sending out emails and newsletters. You can even import your existing contacts, which is something most newsletter services WON’T let you do.

What’s cool is that you can try it for free for 30 days and see if you like it. They have some great HTML templates and the interface is simple to use. Try Aweber for yourself and see why we’ve been working with them for 4 years.

Email Autoresponders

A step beyond email newsletters is an autoresponder, which allows you to schedule a sequence of messages to be sent to every new subscriber. Imagine this email robot sending each new subscriber an immediate welcome email, then a great email with valuable content 2 days later, then a special offer 2 days after that, and so on.

This can be a little more complex to set up than a basic email list, but our friends at Aweber make this easy too.

Our advice, try out Aweber for 30 days to see how that works for you, and go from there.

Search Engine Optimization

Get your hands on this excellent SEO Book and find out how to tap into the amazing amount of free traffic the search engines are just itching to send your way. You just have to know how to talk to them, and you have to give them a good reason to look at you. Check out our review of this book here.

Make Money from Your Blog

Sell text ads with Text-Link-Ads

Do Sponsored Reviews with ReviewMe

Show Targeted eBay auctions on your site with AuctionAds

And of course, Google AdSense

Web Analytics

You can’t reach your goals if you don’t know where you are and how much progress you’re making. The short version – you NEED to know what traffic you’re getting, where it’s coming from, how much it’s increasing or decreasing week to week, and so on.

Here are two great analytics tools we use (yes, both) regularly.

Google Analytics – this is awesome for aggregate stats and trends

ChartBeat – this is a great view of what’s happening on your site real time – right now

Web Hosting Review – Why We Recommend HostGator

Choosing a good web hosting service is one of the most important decisions you will make when starting your blog. Your web host can literally make or break your online success.

If you get a really big traffic spike because you’re YouTube video went viral – can your web hosting plan handle it? Or will your blog simply be ‘unavailable’?

We experience some very large traffic spikes in the beginning of our online presence. At a time when AskDanAndJennifer.com was getting about 10,000 page views per month, one of our article would get featured on a major social media site sending somewhere between 30,000 – 60,000 visitors in one day!

Sounds awesome right? Well it’s awesome until your blog goes down – completely – because your web host can’t handle the traffic spikes.

That was the case with our first web hosting service so we decided to try HostGator. Guess what? Amazingly, our $7/month web hosting plan held its own and we had no more downtime from these traffic spikes. Yes!

I’m not saying HostGator is perfect and we never have any downtime…

Listen, all websites go down occasionally – even Amazon… What matters is how your web hosting provider handles the situation when there’s an issue. HostGator’s email support team responds to tickets very quickly – sometimes in a matter of minutes. Plus, if you need to, you can pick up the phone and call them.

HostGator’s customer service simply cannot be beat. Their staff is knowledgeable, responsive, and helpful – that’s a trifecta in my book.

Are there other good web hosting options?

Sure, there are web hosting companies that offer great good, solid service and reliable servers. But there’s a catch (read on, we’ll spill the beans below).

When we started looking for a good web hosting service a few years ago, we asked around and got a general shoulder shrug from most of our friends. Yeah, they all had one host or another that was “OK”, but nobody could tell us”the best one to go with”. So after a LOT of painstaking research, we ended up with a “short list” of possible contenders and the end decided to go with HostGator.

HostGator – Best web host to start out with. Solid, reliable, and very inexpensive: as low as $5/month. And a unique feature that other low-cost web hosts don’t have: you can sign up monthly, no commitments.

HostGator is great because it JUST WORKS, they offer a lot of great features, and (unlike most other quality web hosts) you can just sign up for an inexpensive monthly plan, month by month. We highly recommend HostGator. The fact that their email support replies to most issues in literally minutes certainly doesn’t hurt.

NOTE: Use Coupon Code BLOGSUCCESS when you sign up with HostGator – and your 1st month is just $0.01! That means you can start a blog today for just $0.01. Now you’ve really got no excuse to delay, so take a few minutes and do it before you get busy and forget!
Need Help? Check out our free blog set up service.

Why We Personally Recommend HostGator

Handling 30,000 – 60,000 visitors to our WordPress blog in a single day is not bad for a $5/month hosting account. We were pretty darn impressed. And that’s why we recommend HostGator to our friends and family regularly…

AND, they offer a 45-Day Money-Back Guarantee… so they really make it easy for you to try it out and see how it actually works for you. If you don’t like it, they’ll give you a full refund, no questions asked. We think that’s pretty cool.

In short, if you want a hosting provider that is inexpensive and JUST WORKS, we recommend you go with HostGator. That’s what we did, and that’s where we send our friends.

So go ahead… Try HostGator for yourself. You’ll be glad you did.

Tip: Don’t forget to use Coupon Code BLOGSUCCESS when you sign up with HostGator – and your 1st month is just $0.01! That means you can start a blog today for just $0.01. Now you’ve really got no excuse to delay, so take a few minutes and do it before you get busy and forget!
Need Help? Check out our free blog set up service.